Amino acids are the “building blocks” of the body. Besides building cells and repairing tissue, they form antibodies to combat invading bacteria & viruses; they are part of the enzyme & hormonal system; they build nucleoproteins (RNA & DNA); they carry oxygen throughout the body and participate in muscle activity. When a protein is broken down by digestion the result is 22 known amino acids. Eight are essential (cannot be manufactured by the body) the rest are non-essential (can be manufactured by the body with proper nutrition).
U.S. Pat. No. 5,099,060 describes diphenolic monomers based on 3-(4-hydroxyphenyl) propionic acid and L-tyrosine alkyl esters (desaminotyrosyl-tyrosine alkyl esters). Subsequent related patents involve variations of this basic monomer structure. These monomers, although useful in many applications, have several limitations. The monomers are insoluble in water, and therefore the polymers made from them are not readily resorbable. In other words, the previously described polymers prepared from the previously described water-insoluble monomers will not have any weight loss while the degradation of the polymer backbone results in the loss of mechanical strength and reduction in the polymer molecular weight. The monomers also provide two phenolic hydroxyl groups, limiting the resulting polymers to be fully aromatic backbone structures, which may lead to good mechanical strength but slow degradation rate.
Poly(hydroxy acids), such as poly(glycolic acid) (PGA), poly(lactic acid) (PLA) and their copolymers are certainly the most widely investigated synthetic, degradable polymers due to their established record of safety and FDA approval. Poly(amino acids) derived from naturally occurring .alpha.-L-amino acids form another major group of degradable polymers. Despite their apparent potential as biomaterials, poly(amino acids) have actually found few practical applications. A major problem is that most of the poly(amino acids) are highly intractable (e.g., non-processible), which limits their utility.
Although several copolymers of hydroxy acids and amino acids have been prepared and evaluated from a biological perspective, their investigation as biomaterials has been rather limited. Helder et al., J. Biomed. Mater. Res., (24), 1005-1020 (1990) discloses the synthesis of glycine and DL-lactic acid copolymers and the resulting in vitro and in vivo degradation. The elegant synthesis of a copolymer derived from lactic acid and lysine was reported by Barrera et al., Macromolecules, (28), 425-432 (1995). The lysine residue was utilized to chemically attach a cell-adhesion promoting peptide to the copolymer. Other polymers of amino acids and hydroxy acids are disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 3,773,737.
The three types of copolymers mentioned above are random copolymers prepared from cyclic monomers by ring-opening polymerization. The composition of the copolymers is highly dependent on the relative reactivity of the two types of cyclic monomers and on the exact polymerization conditions used. It is hard to control the composition and hard to predict the polymer properties. Also, there may be large batch-to-batch variations in the polymer microstructure and sequence. Furthermore, most previous reports described polymers of low molecular weight (Mw<10,000).
There are only a few degradable polymers for medical uses that have been successfully commercialized. Poly(glycolic acid) (PGA), poly(lactic acid) (PLA), and their copolymers are representative examples. In view of the limitations of these polymers, there still remains a need for biodegradable, especially bioresorbable, polymers suitable for use as tissue-compatible materials. For example, many investigators in the emerging field of tissue engineering have proposed to engineer new tissues by transplanting isolated cell populations on biomaterial scaffolds to create functional new tissues in vivo. Bioresorbable materials, whose degradation and resorption rates can be tailored to correspond to the rate of tissue growth, are needed.